Adelaide Festival. Writers Week. 2 Mar 2025
Writers Week (WW) 2025 was unlike any other WW.
Under our glorious blue sky in the lovely leafy garden, it took on a theme of global anxiety, reiterated by speaker after speaker.
As the Premier said, “these are troubling times and we are right to be troubled”.
Indeed, called upon by WW director Louise Adler OAM, Peter Malinauskas played a high-profile role in WW ’25 and gave the most landmark speech of his career, one so wise and statesmanlike that murmurs are growing about his potential as an Australian PM.
Rich in perceptive gravitas and delivered in the Adelaide Town Hall on Sunday March 2 at the WW 2025 Opening event with Sir Simon Schama on Antisemitism, our premier said:
Humani nihil Alienum [hoo-MA-ni neel ah-lee-AY-num]
“Nothing human is alien to me.”
It’s a line drawn from an ancient Greek playwright who predates the birth of Christ.
It’s a simple sentence that speaks volumes.
It’s an inspirational idea, that everything learned and everything achieved by different cultures through different eras has been part of a single great effort, shared by all humankind.
And yet, over two thousand years on, it’s a lesson that our species struggles to learn – and the cost is incalculable.
Earlier this evening Waleed Aly, Susan Carland and Aftab Malik spoke with great clarity about the deleterious effect of Islamophobia on our society.
Shortly you will hear the insights of Sir Simon Schama, exploring the growing and unacceptable visibility of antisemitism in many countries, tragically including our own.
As a democratically elected leader it is my duty to act in the interests of all South Australians: not just those that support one particular party, or one particular economic class, or one particular faith.
So, I should be crystal clear:
Antisemitism has no place in our free and democratic society, any more than Islamophobia or other forms of bigotry with which we are all to familiar.
The very fact that I feel the need to say this is and of itself should be a source of alarm.
There is power in forums like Writers’ Week because it gives us the opportunity to ventilate important issues, but that it does so in a way that brings the temperature down.
I appreciate that it’s sometimes hard to maintain an even temper over matters of deep conscience. That’s part of what it is to be human.
Late last week a mate sent me a text message. It was of a link to a YouTube clip and it was from the Year 2000. It was President Carter with President Ford on stage at a presidential library event. And they spoke with such eloquence and simplicity about the value of civility and the power of thoughtful political discourse in a way that would elevate all rather than being at the expense of some.
And I watched it, and I found it stunning. Only because it was so different in the context with which we are now all too familiar.
It feels like a balance has tipped in recent times, when high emotion too often turns conversation into a debate, and a debate into a battle. It’d be naïve not to recognise that there are those who seek to throw kindling on that raging fire, from media, old and new, that survive through hate-clicks and politicians reliant on keeping an electorate too righteously indignant to trust the evidence of their own senses.
No side of politics is immune to the poison of our increased polarisation: this wilful blindness that underpins the condescending scolds of the Left just as much as the conspiracy theories from the right-wing Q-anon adherents.
And this should terrify us all, because we live in a time of exceptional global uncertainty.
We are seeing incredible threats to stability, whether through technological disruption, geopolitical brinksmanship, or the erosion of trusted institutions.
We no longer have the luxury to remain complacent about the primacy of old alliances or shared values on the global stage.
Every week there seems to be a new low in the discourse, a new threat to global détente.
So, it’s entirely understandable that in an environment of escalating uncertainty, electorates are increasingly gravitating to strong, confident, decisive leaders. And it’s not a bad thing for a leader to be strong.
But more strength is found in compassion than complicity in rising division.
Compassion is the antidote to tribalism. It is resistant to the power of disinformation. It challenges us, each of us, to ignore the howls of the mob and listen for the whispers of our better angels.
Fortunately we have a powerful weapon at our disposal in the pursuit of compassion: the operation of an open, liberal democracy.
Democracy was created to curb the authoritarian impulses of the powerful and the cruel, and to give voice to people to determine their own path.
All forms of racial or religious hatred are undemocratic, by definition, for they seek to silence competing voices, and remove that choice and autonomy.
But every democracy, every society, is a work in progress.
We have learned that trying to confine these hatreds to dark corners of the internet only allows the bigotry to metastasize like the cancer it is, mutating into the sort of conspiratorial worldview which could so easily infect our own body politic, unless we do all we can to inoculate against it.
We have seen that democracy can be fragile, and that its protection – its very survival – demands vigilance, care, and action.
Since I had the privilege to last speak at this event, I am very proud that since then, South Australia has passed legislation to regulate social media, to ban political donations from all, and to bring civics into the state curriculum.
We do these things because they bolster our democracy, and more specifically bolster our citizens’ faith in democracy as working for them, for their families, and most importantly, for the generations to come.
With such action, there is hope a public discourse where civility and respect and evidence-based data can compete with the lies of strongman leaders and overseas bot farms.
It has never been more important for democratic countries to actively make the case for democracy itself and to take steps to preserve and strengthen it – because we have seen where those authoritarian impulses can lead.
Which brings me back to tonight’s topic, and to the great society that respect and kindness has built in this city, and this state in particular.
These are troubling times. And we are right to be troubled.
But we also remember a truth so obvious that it’s sometimes easy to take for granted: that we are better together.
Our differences make us stronger. Variety and diversity are essential survival traits, for every form of life on this planet.
And this natural law applies equally to nations.
The last century of Australia’s history makes abundantly clear that the more effectively we remove barriers to participation, the more viewpoints we consider, the more expertise and wisdom we can draw upon, the better off we become.
We see these improvements in health status, in educational attainment, in life expectancy, in economic prosperity, in every metric you can name.
The reality is that greater access to opportunity brings improvement in standards of living across the board.
This is what democracy makes possible.
We must not, and we will not, let this incredible bounty, this product of great work and great cooperation, be toppled by hatred and division.
Hate builds nothing. But if our actions are underpinned by the timeless values of respect and compassion, our future is boundless.
Nothing human is alien to me.
These are the words of our better angels.
I believe, as I know everyone here does, that it is within our ability in Australia, amongst its people to continue to be a beacon of hope and democracy underpinned by sound values where we care for others more than we care for ourselves – the quintessential egalitarian ideal that binds us together in this nation.
I believe we can do this.
If we have the courage to be kind.
Louise Adler. We bless her. We curse her.
She has laid on the most breathtakingly relevant Writers Week in the event’s long history.
She has broken away from the convention of fine and interesting authors embroidering their presence with attention to the deeper politics of the world around us. She has added the ingredients of turbulence, creating new crowds which snake in queues out of the Drill Hall every day.
There, 700 or more people can devour the knowledge and opinions of leading intellectuals, she’s done it again at the Town Hall.
These are ticketed events in this, the world’s one and only, free Writer’s festival. They don’t break the bank.
Samela Harris
